The Words of the Garcia Family
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The Words of the Garcia Family |
And there came a messenger to Job, and said, "The oxen were plowing and the asses feeding beside them; and the Sabeans fell upon them and took them, and slew the servants with the edge of the sword; and I alone have escaped to tell you." While he was yet speaking, there came another, and said, "The fire of God fell from heaven and burned up the sheep and the servants, and consumed them; and I alone have escaped to tell you".... While he was yet speaking, there came another, and said, "Your sons and daughters were eating and drinking wine in their eldest brother's house; and behold, a great wind came across the wilderness, and struck the four corners of the house, and it fell upon the young people, and they are dead; and I alone have escaped to tell you."
Then Job rose, and rent his robe, and shaved his head, and fell upon the ground, and worshiped. And he said, "Naked I came from my mother's womb, and naked shall I return; the Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord."
In all this Job did not sin or charge God with wrong.
Job 1:14-22
Not long ago I was visiting a friend in the hospital. As I rode up to the third floor, a priest came on the elevator. The car rode up and he leaned against the wall, evidently exhausted. I said, "A priest in a hospital. There's a man with a really tough job." He looked up at me, smiled, and nodded. I had to get off, but I always wished I could have talked to him. What do you say to a man who's just lost a wife to cancer or lost a child in a car accident with a drunk driver? How do you explain God's love to somebody who is diagnosed with a fatal disease and has two weeks to live? How do you explain it to yourself day after day?
Human beings have been asking those kinds of questions since the dawn of time. Thousands of years ago an unknown poet wrote a story of a man named Job, who wrestled with the great questions of life as no man ever did before, ultimately confronting God Himself with his great rage over human suffering.
Long regarded as one of the greatest religious poems of all time, the book of Job, a dialogue between Job and his friends and finally between Job and God, bristles with blasphemous anger, hardboiled honesty, and soaring spirituality, as one pain-wracked human being finally takes his complaints to the ultimate Manager. And its value for us is the profound understanding it offers to all thinking people about faith and suffering.
Nobody knows for sure whether Job was a historical person. The poet employs the character of Job as an archetype to illustrate his ideas about life. In the beginning of the story, Job is the archetype of "the good guy." The poet is going to confront, in his own way, the traditional view that good is always rewarded with prosperity and evil with poverty and suffering.
The story opens with Job being described as a man of the loftiest purity imaginable. Job is more than merely good; he is impossibly good, a virtuoso of virtue. There is not a single thing he has done in his lite for which he can be accused. Yet he repents every day for his own obscure sins and for any sins his family and friends may have done or even contemplated doing.
His chief business in life is the constant waxing and polishing of his moral tidiness.
The poet emphasizes these things in light of what is about to happen to Job.
His well-shined morals attract the attention of both God and Satan. God holds him up to Satan as an example of a good man. Satan scoffs at this, replying that Job is well financed for his so-called goodness, but that if his rewards were suddenly removed he would forget all about God. Besides setting the stage for the persecution of Job that is to come, Satan is proposing a profound accusation. Essentially Satan is saying that orthodoxy alone does not equal faith. Although Job may be outwardly correct, he may simply be afraid of offending his benefactor, the source of his comfort amid luxury. If Job discovers no profit in being good, his pretense at loving God will dissolve in curses.
A wager is made to see how far Job can be tormented before he breaks. God gives Satan permission to do anything he pleases short of killing Job outright. Satan goes to work, and without warning Job suddenly finds himself crushed under a rock slide of every conceivable disaster that can befall a human being. His livestock are slaughtered in a stroke, his children are killed, and his wealth and property are destroyed.
Numb with horror, Job tears his robe and sits despondently in the ashes of his home. His body breaks out in boils, and he takes a piece of broken glass to scratch them with. Job's wife comes to him and says, "Do you still hold fast to your integrity? Curse God, and die." He tells her she is a foolish woman, and he sits in the ashes trying to understand why these things have happened to him.
Even though Job would very much like to end it all, he claims he will never curse his God.
It could be a shred of faith Job clings to, or maybe he is afraid God would just strike him with something even nastier. Yet it is hard to imagine that there is anything left that could happen to him. Job has gone from the archetype of the good guy to the archetype of the last guy." When you feel sad, there's always a friend who can point out some poor soul to you and say, "You don't have it so bad; look at that guy." And it makes you feel a little better that at least things haven't gone that far. But Job is meant to be the very last rotten apple in the bottom of the barrel of mankind. He can't point at anybody and say, "Look at that guy." Job is it. Even though Satan has thrown everything he has at Job and Job's faith is still holding up, there is one thing coming that even Satan hasn't thought of. It is the one thing left that will shatter Job's faith to pieces.
Exhausted by suffering, Job cries out to God for his death and the release from his misery in oblivion. What comes to him turns out to be something even worse. Three of his old friends show up. Aghast at his ruin, his friends sit with him in silence for a week. It is the Hebrew tradition when calling on someone in mourning to wait for that person to speak first. Job doesn't have much to say. So after a while they bring up the great question he has been hiding from in his own mind:
"What did you do?"
Which is to say, what kind of hideous crime against God and man did you commit to offend God so that He would smash you into the earth this way? Don't you know that good is always rewarded, while evil is punished? You must have deserved what happened to you. So what did you do?
And Job really has no idea. Job is the good guy, Mr. Clean. Had this happened to someone else, he would have also wondered what titillating sin they'd committed. But in his case, he knows the answer, and it terrifies him: He hasn't done anything at all to deserve these things. Under the surface, his friends are afraid also. In their hearts they know Job is probably a better man than any of them. If this could happen to him, maybe it could just as easily happen to them, too. They are desperate to uncover his sin, rather than face the possibility that we are all on a runaway train with no one at the wheel. Maybe his ancestors...?
His friends persist in tormenting him with their arguments and implied accusations. These are the very ideas he had believed in himself, and now these ideas have turned on him with a vengeance.
He is tortured by his doubts and the prosperity of his cruel friends compared to his own undiminishing pain. But most of all he is tortured by the idea that God does not love him after all, that God has suddenly, capriciously, abandoned him. He could take losing his property, his family, even his health. 13/ t thinking that he has lost God's love for no good reason pushes him over the edge. His flawless faith crumbles.
For the first time he becomes openly angry at God. Why should anyone suffer? Why should any creature be born into this tough world, plod through its days in ignorance, and then die? "What is the meaning of life?" he rages. His suffering has become transcendent, the plaintive voice of mankind crying out at his Creator without any pretense of humility or servility, because at last he has nothing to lose.
His three friends are terrified at his nearly blasphemous ravings, and they argue with him, using trite examples of God's justice that Job rejects again and again out of hand. Finally Job invokes a Hebrew law that says when a man is accused of a crime, he has the right to confront his accuser and his evidence and dispute it. Job feels his accuser is God Himself, and he demands to meet Him and be given reasons why he was brought to ruin.
And God shows up.
A whirlwind blows in from the desert, and out of the whirlwind the spirit of God appears. He thunders down His own questions at Job. "Where were you when I created the world and its creatures?
What do you know about good and evil? Just who do you think you are?" Those readers hoping for a good fight are disappointed by Job's answer: "I am dust." Seeing God face-to-face, he backs down, like a terrorized field mouse under the shadow of a diving eagle running him down. There is no contest.
But God's answer to all this is the most mysterious thing of all. Instead of being angry at Job, He is angry at Job's friends. He accuses them of not speaking the truth as Job has. He sets Job up as a classic Abel figure and tells them to make sacrifices through Job on their behalf and that Job will pray for them. The story says that God accepts Job's prayer and that afterwards He gives Job twice as much of all the material goods he had lost before. Job again becomes the father of seven sons and three daughters and lives happily ever after.
Though it may seem vague at first, we can learn a lot from God's answer to Job.
In the top drawer of my desk lives an ugly black spider. While rummaging through my desk for something, I've often run across him, and more than once I've lifted up the dictionary to crush him and then thought, "I don't have to do that; he's not bothering me. Even a spider has a right to live." And yet I know if I tried to explain these human ideas to the spider he probably wouldn't understand, and if he did he wouldn't agree. Because to a predator, life and death are just business. If I kill him or he kills me it's nothing personal.
Ideas about mercy, pity, or reverence for life are meaningless to him. Human life exists on a whole other level of consciousness.
In God's answer to Job, He seems to be saying that there are levels of good and evil that are way beyond our comprehension. There's as great a difference between God and Job as between me and a spider.
What would good and evil amount to in the kind of world Job wants? When the rewards of good or evil are strictly a matter of cause and effect, you don't need prayer or even a conscience. Morality becomes simply a matter of following an instruction booklet. When something goes wrong you track down your sin and fix the problem and reap your just rewards. Under such a system we would be reduced to the level of the spider, where life and death are just business and nothing personal. There would be no hatred and no love.
Satan's original accusation towards Job was that his faith was mechanistic and had nothing to do with love. When Job was stripped of absolutely everything that made his life bearable, including God's love, his orthodoxy disappeared and he discovered for the first time his real love for God and his fellow man.
He really wanted to believe in God's justice. He wanted to believe that somehow God would prove Himself innocent of Job's charges. He wanted to see God prove him wrong. He also realized that what he was going through now was the common lot of humanity. And he wept for humanity from the bottom of his heart and felt compassionate outrage for his fellow man. These were things he would never have realized if he hadn't suffered.
When you taste failure and disappointment in life, you begin to notice other people. And when you see them going through those same things, you see the beauty and courage of ordinary men and women. Faith does not come from orthodoxy, but more often exists by way of doubt itself. Just as courage is not the reckless absence of fear, but rather the overmastering of great fear with a great purpose, faith can often be the overmastering of great doubt with a great sense of purpose and loyalty.
Faith is the product of an attitude that is disappearing from our affluent society, the attitude of permanent commitment to a person or group. It used to be that the family was the mediator between the individual and society, because the family was the place where a person learned about commitment. Parents and children, and brothers and sisters, were bound by common blood to stand by each other through good times and bad. A fighting faith in God doesn't mean we believe everything we're told, but rather it means that we belong to God and His righteousness no matter what happens to us, good or bad. The Principle refers to this attitude as "chastity of faith."
Jesus Christ and our Father have both showed this absolute standard in their own lives. Jesus had the mission to save all mankind, and he kept on going as he saw his hopes fading, his prayers go unanswered, and all his followers abandon him one after another. Finally, when he hung alone and despised on the cross, he still believed that he was God's Son and that God loved him. He never doubted God's love or his own relationship with God.
A few short years ago, our True Father went through a tremendous ordeal of suffering. His beloved son Heung Jin Nim was killed, and he himself was sent to prison on trumped-up charges. But he never complained and he never got angry at God or anyone else. He continually thought of the work to be done and had a kind word for everyone around him. It was a great learning experience for those of us who were not with him during the early days of the Korean church, when Father lived in poverty and obscurity, to be able to see him under such circumstances and learn from his example of steadfastness. Even though we all wish such troubles had never come, it's at such times that he shows us the way to practice chastity of faith.
There is a legend that the happily-ever-after ending of the story of Job was not the original ending but was tacked on by religious authorities who were offended by the story but unable to suppress its popularity. The legend is that the story really ended with Job sitting in his lonely ash pit, scratching his sores, surrounded by the ruins of all he had loved, and looking to heaven and sighing, But still, I love God..."
A servant works for reward; a true child works for love and loyalty. When one man was hanging despised and abandoned on a cross 2,000 years ago, and later, when another man was sitting in prison after burying his beloved son, they both showed us the greatest example of faith by saying, "But still, I love God..."